skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interest rates everywhere have been low for a long time; the US whacked them up to 5.5% to combat inflation, but that's expected to decline.

In general the rates for house buying are so good because the loan is secured on the house, whose value is very stable.
Discover Talent
Everyone here knows that hiring tech talent is often tedious for everyone involved. We rolled out a new feature, "Discover Talent," which aims to get companies to engage with vetted software engineers earlier and more effectively. By detailing specific needs, they get immediate access to a pool of candidates vetted by senior engineers.
This still means you can pack more performance into the chip though - because you're limited by cooling.
Wait a bit. M2 wasn't as good as the hype was.
It depends what type of game you like. There are a million AA RPGs, Metroidvanias, etc. that are enjoyable. Both RoboCop: Rogue City and Terminator: Resistance are good, budget games. Looking through recent games: Dead Cells, Bloodstained, anything from Bitmap Bureau, a lot of Way Forward titles, Altus, etc.
Clever wording on their part: 2x performance per watt over M2. Took me a minute, had to reason through this is their 2nd generation 3nm chip, so it wasn't from a die shrink, then go spelunking.
IMO the uses for a technical document (design doc or a shorter doc) is simple. If you get to the point where you can't hold every single detail about a project in your head at once then you should write a doc. Similarly, if it will take a long time (30 minutes at least) to explain to another engineer, you write a doc, to save yourself time.

IDK how you can think that you never need to write a document
It surprised me they called it an M4 vs an M3 something. The display engine seems to be the largest change I don't know what that looked like on previous processors. Completely hypothesizing but could be a significant efficiency improvement if its offloading display stuff.
Further reading - https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/03...
My guess is that the market size fit current yields.
Not for XBox though. Mine has turned into an expensive paperweight we occasionally use to play the same 2-3 local co-op games we played 4 years ago.
I recently updated my password generator module[1] to use math/rand/2 with the ChaCha8 source. The performance improvement was quite nice and the security stays the same or better, given that I now rely on Go's algorithm for a unbiased random number instead of my own.

All in all, I leave my thanks for the excellent work done by the Go team here!

[1]: https://sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/acopw-go/
On one hand, it's crazy. On the other hand, it's pretty typical for the industry.

Average performance per watt doubling time is 2.6 years: https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/performance-per-watt#:~:text=T....
The one thing that makes me hesitate with nix is that it only really supports Linux and Darwin; of the BSDs only FreeBSD has any support (somewhat suboptimal still), and AIUI Windows is also unsupported.
Please no. I don't want no touch support in macOS.
Sadly, this is only processor power consumption, you need to put power into a whole lot of other things to make an useful computer… a display backlight and the system's RAM come to mind as particular offenders.
I agree, although having bought a Samsung Tab S9 for this reason, it too seems to be very limiting. Samsung Dex is cool and all, but the app selection on Android is worse than iOS and I couldn’t find a way to run Linux since Linux on Dex was killed off.
I feel like I've got to read it eventually just so I can be up to speed on all the millions of references to it in other works of art. In a college class recently, we read beowulf, and I was confused what was meant when grendel was described as being from "cain's clan" - I was raised non-religiously by parents who had both been burned pretty bad by institutional religion, so it was pretty much only me and an asian immigrant in that class who needed the reference explained. (Granted, I was one of the few non english majors in that class, which also probably affected my lack of understanding.)
I’m pretty sure they didn’t ship a new iPad in 2023 fwiw
Call me crazy, but I want all that power in a 7" tablet. I like 7" tablets most because they feel less clunky to carry around and take with you. Same with 13" laptops, I'm willing to sacrifice on screen real estate for saving myself from the back pain of carrying a 15" or larger laptop.

Some of this is insanely impressive. I wonder how big the OS ROM (or whatever) is with all these models. For context, even if the entire OS is about 15GB, in order to get some of these features locally just for an LLM on its own, its about 60GB or more, for something ChatGPT esque. Which requires me to spend thousands on a GPU.

Apologies for the many thoughts, I'm quite excited by all these advancements. I always say I want AI to work offline and people tell me I'm moving the goalpost, but it is truly the only way it will become mainstream.
Sotheby's market update seems to suggest home prices are still falling: https://www.elizabethlorenzo.com/market-update (page 5)
The economic reasoning behind this doesn't make sense to me.

What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?
Man stubs toe on Tesla, quick let’s make it a top headline
Regulators are generally blinder when it comes to huge organizations. Boeing is a huge DOD contractor. They have a direct line to people at the top of the US govt., just like other huge organizations.

It is a big fish, and it is hard to fry.

US govt. discussed shut downs during COVID with largest organizations in the US before they even occurred. Some knew they were coming before anything was announced.

It isn't some kind of conspiracy either, most governments will "care" more about the biggest contractors and businesses in their nation.
I think the main reason for flame wars isn't the depth of threads but the users. Usenet had no such depth limits, LessWrong doesn't have them today.
have you seen the https://openbb.co/ project? an open source Bloomberg Terminal project you may find interesting ;-)
If you're intersted in this topic, there exist more string compression algorithms that save data transfer or memory in different ways. Look into Thrift Compact Protocol, MessagePack, Protocol Buffers and Avro.
It's fairly absurd that they're still selling a 256gb "Pro" machine in the first place.

That said, Apple's policy toward SKUs is pretty consistent: you pay more money and you get more machine, and vice versa. The MacBooks are the only product which has separately configurable memory / storage / chip, and even there some combinations aren't manufactured.
Modern hardware is complex (there's a computer at the other end too), but sometimes people actually succeed in making the interface simpler. NVMe is a surprisingly simple hardware interface from the driver's perspective, just ringbuffers in memory. Many modern network devices are similar, but not standardized.
I wouldn't say it's a necessary feature, but it's particularly important for frameless & partially transparent apps with irregularly shaped UI components that interact with the mouse (see example here [1]; need to click the play button). Having an invisible rectangle around the component where mouse clicks mysteriously disappear can feel inelegant. This feature is also especially important for my own use case where I'm trying to make an app where the UI is essentially a "frame" around the screen, rather than a traditional window. It's much easier (& surprisingly efficient via the IE browser control) to simply use a single webview the size of the entire screen, render in the border regions and let mouse events fall through the transparent pixels.

[1] https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/1335#issuecommen...

Edit: fixed the link
What were some of the unanticipated challenges they faced?
That's interesting. For some reason I imagined it's still a requirement now.
Well at the end of the day the processors are bottlenecked by its OS. What real value does an iPad bring that a typical iPhone + Mac combo misses? (Other than being a digital notebook…)
Wow, thanks for that detailed answer!
given that a 2 bedroom apartment in nyc _starts_ at 2 million

you can see how the numbers start evening out :)
The thing is... rents rise over time while a fixed rate mortgage balance doesn't.

So I think you'd need an additional 2-3% return on that interest-bearing account just to account for inflation.

In most cities the price to rent ratio makes no sense so I'm a renter for life. I do fantasize about a 2.5% fixed 50-year interest-only mortgage and never paying it down. If only those existed. I think Sweden comes close but the rates there are adjustable.
I agree with nearly everything you say. I'm of the opinion that regulation/bureaucracy are being scapegoated to an extent. Supply of knowledgeable builders and development finance is not very elastic and does not increase easily even when there is less regulation.

The real reason I feel is the higher risk = higher reward equation is broken.
Building fewer units means increasing scarcity, allowing increased prices despite there being lower (due to building less houses). Developers are chasing good profit margins rather than revenue. Less regulation just means even better profit margins for these developers.
Seems like they are just using a custom 5 bit charset for strings with a limited alphabet.

That's not really a rethink of string encoding, just using a different fixed encoding.

Given the usecase, not sure i understand why not just use static huffman.
This is great but why even bother with the M3?

The M3 Macs were released only 7 months ago.
I'm wondering if it's because they're hitting the limits of the architecture, and it sounds way better to compare M4 vs M2 as opposed to vs M3, which they'd have to do if it launched in a Macbook Pro.
I'd use something like that, provided it lives in my closet next to a big red physical kill switch.
Others have mentioned a few of the (huge) problems of falling prices on mortgaged houses.

But on the "upside" - for most people, the idea that they are quickly getting richer and richer, because they have a house - that has a massive emotional appeal.
Yes, this is the real problem
I’d much rather buy fully specced iPad Pro than a MacBook Air if only it wasn’t neutered by the iPad OS. And that probably is an issue for Apple since they don’t want products to canibalize each other. They want you to buy each and every product.

As it stands today even first gen iPad Pro 11 is more than powerful enough given software limitations.
The reasoning is money. Come on.
I wonder to what degree this also implies, "More opportunities for speculative execution attacks".
Hopefully in the Mac Mini at WWDC.
Well, this is the heart of the "appliance" model. iPads are appliances. You wouldn't ask about running custom code on your toaster or your blender, so you shouldn't ask about that for your iPad. Also all the common reasons apply: Security and Privacy, Quality Control, Platform Stability and Compatibility, and Integrated User Experience. All of these things are harmed when you are allowed to run custom coding.

(disclaimer: My personal opinion is that the "appliance" model is absurd, but I've tried to steel-man the case for it)
I think they mentioned that cold brew has lower acidity than hot brew.

Yes it’s agitation with the mentioned frequency. Technically it should move the grounded coffee particles back and worth and so extracting the components.
Arkane's Prey is one of my favorite games ever, shame they were "rewarded" like this.
Have ou tried Termux ?
> the idea of spending a cool $1000 on a neutered consumption device gets less appealing with each generation

It's not for you and that's okay. They sell big boy computers and if you don't like any of them, there are plenty of others. For me, Good Notes and Procreate are killer apps that justify the device.

My current iPad is six or seven years old. If I spent $1500 this time around and it lasts me six years, that works out to something like $0.65 per day.
It forces you to buy multiple upgrades instead of just the one you need.
I always wonder how constraining it is to design these chips subject to thermal and energy limitations. I paid a lot of money for my hardware and I want it to go as fast as possible. I don't want my fans to be quiet, and I don't want my battery life to be 30 minutes longer, if it means I get more raw performance in return. But instead, Apple's engineers have unilaterally decided to handicap their own processors for no real good reason.
Aside from investors, the people who benefit from high housing prices are property owners who are downgrading, specifically moving to a smaller home or cheaper area, which is what older folks whose kids have moved out do.

As an oversimplified example, let's say in one world you're a senior who moves from your family home worth $200,000 to a condo worth $100,000; that's $100k in profit. If housing prices are uniformly 4x that, you're moving from a home worth $800k to $400k; your profit is also 4x. So it's in your best interest for housing prices to be uniformly high.

You're right that for those looking to upgrade it's not beneficial, but as with everything, the 50+ age bracket are the voters and politicians, so the policies that benefit them are what get put into place.
Given that recent Apple laptops already have solid all-day battery life, with such a big performance per watt improvement, I wonder if they'll end up reducing how much battery any laptops ship with to make them lighter.
> Call me crazy, but I want all that power in a 7" tablet

Aren't phones getting close to 7" now? The iPhone pro is 6.2", right?
I'd settle for some version of xcode, or some other way of not requiring a macOS machine to ship iOS apps.
This is pretty awesome. I wonder if it has a fix for the the GoFetch security flaw?
> I wonder how much of that is Apple engineering and how much is TSMC improving their 3nm process.

I think Apple's design choices had a huge impact on the M1's performance but from there on out I think it's mostly due to TSMC.
When doing ad-hoc space optimized encodings, it’s usually a good idea to compare the compress+decompress speed in addition to the resultant size against just compressing the data. This may win on one-off encodings of strings within an RPC, but the compression mechanism probably wins on the overall RPC message unless the message is very small & you can’t build a more optimized baseline dictionary for small messages.

It’s really hard to actually beat something like zstd with these ad-hoc compression since both the compressed size will be bigger than what zstd produces with a dictionary or on larger messages without a dictionary AND the speed of a round trip through zstd is likely faster.
I think it’s a price discrimination technique.
If a project is sufficiently large and well thought out then architectural changes can be incorporated without too much extra work relative to the whole.
Powerful New Chatbot Mysteriously Returns in the Middle of the Night
Sorry to be a noob, but does anyone have a rough estimate of when this m4 chip will be in a macbook air or macbook pro?
Margins and profit. Less variations in production makes for higher efficiency. Segmenting the product line can push consumers to purchase higher tiers of product. It's iOS anyways, and the people who know enough to care how much RAM they are getting are self-selecting for those higher product tiers.
There is a tax exemption on your first 250k of capital gains when you sell your house. The interest on your mortgage is tax deductible. If home prices increase 10% each year, then you can maximize earnings by moving to a more expensove house every few years.

In this way, your home is like a leveraged tax sheltered investment, and the limits are much higher than an IRA.
The way I've heard it used is thus:

In a complex system you are attempting to simplify (or deprecate components of), and where you cannot find an owner or stakeholder over some component system -- unplug the component and wait for errors or user complaints. Thus you will find out who is affected by the component and who likely stakeholders should be.

For example, old graybeards like myself will almost all have a story of finding some lost Sun or Irix server sitting under a pile of gear in an old closet, happily turned on with nobody current employed who knows anything about it.

What does it do? What's the user/password? How did it get there? all lost to the sands of time.

Turning it off will let you know if you can retire it or if somebody emerges with a problem then they can own it.
Honestly, as someone deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem, I still find myself scratching my head over the random segmentation of the iPad lineup.

There's this whole circus with the Apple Pencil compatibility: one iPad works with the 1st generation Pencil, another supports the 2nd, a two others support the third, and i guess a new magic pencil pro? That's 4 pencils out in the wild.

The real kicker for me is how both devices are hamstrung more by their software than by any hardware limitations so, really, what can an iPad Pro can do off that the Air can't?

Apple’s product marketing isn't doing us any favors here. Their comparison table is laughable:
https://www.apple.com/ipad/

There's a reason why I loved the simplicity of Steve Jobs' product quadrant when he came back to Apple. And a great part of it was the fact that each product addressed a specific category of user. Whereas the iPad lineup has created categories in search of a user.
And the problem with that is it's technically illegal (yes really, see ICERD of 1996, yet there is TONS of blatant misinformation about this online), but is extremely common and widespread because nobody bothers to sue for it. I mean, you wouldn't want to rent from someone that irrationally hates you in the first place, so they just keep moving and nothing ever improves.

https://ies.keio.ac.jp/upload/20210514appliedpaper.pdf

And even though it is technically illegal, some courts in Japan have already ruled that some types of "discrimination" is somehow OK if it's argued as a specific technicality, such as "foreigner means not a citizen and therefore more likely to move back home" rather than declining explicitly based on race/skin color/country of origin. Plus "precedent" is not really a thing in such civil law countries so that makes further cases no less difficult to defend.
Technically interesting and possibly useful at an industrial scale, but I think I'll stick to my moka pot/french press setups. Both are good enough and easy enough for me.
There are multiple possible explanations, that differ in different places (bearing in mind this affects most developed economies).

1. cash buyers
2. people holding off selling in hope of a recover in prices
3. inflation turning real terms declines into currency terms rises
4. demographic changes (smaller household sizes) increasing demand for the number of units
5. population movements both within and between countries
6. laws and regulations that slow down building.
Comparing the tech specs for the outgoing and new iPad Pro models, that potential is very much not real.

Old: 28.65 Wh (11") / 40.88 Wh (13"), up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video.

New: 31.29 Wh (11") / 38.99 Wh (13"), up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video.
Prices never went down in Canada for any substantial amount. Even 10% means we replay back to 1-2 years. Government of Canada actively intervene and change the immigration rate and the discount rate to keep prices from falling.
the number of mortgage-free residential homes in the USA is at record levels, increasing steadily in the last 20 years. Contrast this to the demographic bulge of middle class born shortly after WW II, and the financial advantages of long-term home ownership with low monthly costs.
Keyboard shortcuts coming soon! :D Also, curious to know where exactly you wanted to use arrow keys: moving horizontally between threads?
Although as I undserstand m3 chips with more VRAM handle larger LLMs better because they can load more into VRAM compared to 4090.
99% of cars sold in US 2015 and 2022 expose to toxin linked to cancer and autism
>Regardless what police or governments want, they have to abide by laws

I can't tell if this person actually believes what they wrote, or if it is some kind of attempted public social pressure technique meant to adjust the Overton Window from a rational place.

Be it 2024 or 1624, to assert that one trusts the gov to "not fuck them over" takes a special type of naivete. It certainly takes a general obliviousness to the news cycle, willful or otherwise. As well as an obliviousness to the logic of self-interest, bureaucratic expediency, State survival, profit motivation, corruption, party politics, and more. It takes an obliviousness to history.

I doubt that few people in law enforcement, public bureaucracies, or even in most elected offices would agree with the statement under discussion. In fact, the most best (or most just) system seems to be mostly built on fail-safes against being fucked over in this manner, even if all systems arguably eventually fall to corruption. Which underscores such government motivation.

If your take is that "in many countries governments are truly life threatening to minorities", then the rest of the Profession of Trust makes no logical sense for the population generally: if the bar is the threat to life. And while that is a sensible ceiling for a "do not trust" conclusion, I would argue that the bar doesn't need to be that high.
>- Up to 1.5x the CPU speed of iPad Pro's previous M2 chip

What I want to know is whether that ratio holds for single-core performance measurements.
Money? When 90% of revenue comes from yearly sports, FPS, etc. refreshes, it’s easy for middle managers to get the idea that cutting the fat will increase margins. Unwittingly, they are missing the opportunity to find that new hit franchise that needs to be tested and refined outside of the mainstream.
Maybe this June there'll be an announcement, but like Lucy with the football, I'm not expecting it. I would instabuy if this was the case, especially with a cellular iPad.
As with any Apple device — or honestly, any computing device in general — my criteria of evaluation would be the resulting performance if I install Linux on it. (If Linux is not installable on the device, the performance is zero. If Linux driver support is limited, causing performance issues, that is also part of the equation.)

NB: those are my criteria of evaluation. Very personally. I'm a software engineer, with a focus on systems/embedded. Your criteria are yours.

(But maybe don't complain if you buy this for its "AI" capabilities only to find out that Apple doesn't let you do anything "unapproved" with it. You had sufficient chance to see the warning signs.)
It's time to make 'hush trips' a fireable offense
It's just Apple's price ladder. The prices on their different SKUs are laid out carefully so that there's never a too big of a jump to the next level.

https://talkbackcomms.com/blogs/news/ladder
The Half-Life of Magic
It's based on wayvnc and noVNC with WebRTC transport instead of Web Sockets. The WebRTC transport layer has not been made public.
M2 was launched in June 2022 [1] so a little under 2 years ago. Apple is a bit ahead of that 2.6 years, but not by much.

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with...
X11 is legacy, and the faster we bury it, the better. A display server that predates Perl and Windows 2.0, and has some of the worst code quality in the world, has no place in the future of Linux desktops.
'member Games For Windows ~~Live~~ Dead ?
It means a lot to me, because cutting power consumption in half for millions of devices means we can turn off power plants (in aggregate). It’s the same as lightbulbs; I’ll never understand why people bragged about how much power they were wasting with incandescents.